Nature is what you and I think it to be, from the word left to the idea of right

While I wasn’t in class because of being ill, when we discussed Professor Maniates’ view on environmentalists focusing only on “easy” solutions, it made so much sense.
I’ve read a lot of books and articles dedicated to simple steps to being environmental at home. Recycle, install fluorescent light bulbs, consume green products. It was interesting, in direct contrast to environmental theory on the internal concerns of consumption and overproduction, we are often told to buy into that consumption because that’s our “vote”.
Often times, in talking to people who are not environmental scientists or policy makers, in order the words, the people that form public opinion, I hear complaints that “there is nothing we can do”, “this is human nature”, rather than rallies of “we can change the way we live”. So they argue that they might as well stay status quo, because humans won’t change, it’s our nature to kill each other, waste electricity, eat processed food.
But it’s not our nature, we only recently have started eating McDonalds, recently set up power plants in their current configuration, recently started nuking other people. These things have only happened in the last 100 years, are they really set in stone? We live in an age of the internet, where people like me can figure those things out, but we also live in an age of so much information being stuffed down out throat, we end up accepting other peoples’ way of life as well it seems.
Human nature is so hard to discern simply because it’s our very thinking. Our scope of thoughts, going from nothing to oblivion to all to universal to individual to collective and all the relevant and irrelevant in betweens, represent our very nature. If there is some way to behave outside that scope, it doesn’t exist because it was never thought of. Indeed many of us are murderers, but many of us are nonviolent as well. For as many people to think we are selfish, there needs to be a recognizing force that remembers that just as many of us are the opposite and have the potential to turn that way as well.
Consuming green is a recent phenomenon, and in an age where everything is fast food, we need to realize so called easy tv dinner solutions to the environment aren’t the healthiest. More advocates following such a school of thought need to help others delve into that mindset and figure out what needs to be done, lowering energy consumption through efficiency and advanced technology, redefining city infrastructure to reduce consumption pollution, redefining our energy system, and most importantly, redefining our system of thought to make sure the word environment is so ingrained in our system that is reduced to oblivion, the term environmental ethics just becomes ethics.
Maniates’ trinity of despair is a valid one, and too often we have seen humanity try to consume its way to success (buying more pesticide rather than using natural pesticides and predators to reduce pests), I hope his work goes notice, it is part of our nature to want to know, that’s why we as a race exist today, not by some viral accident.